Anthony Seldon - The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain

Much the same applies to the suggestion that inexorable tides of change have disempowered the state. No one can dispute that the British state is less effective, less respected and, in important ways, less powerful today than it was in 1945. This is scarcely surprising. In 1945, it had just emerged triumphant from the most terrible test in its entire history. It had nowhere to go but down. The same is true, in varying degrees, of the other victor states of the Second World War. The Soviet Union has disappeared altogether, while the United States has suffered a decline almost as marked as that of the British state. But it is not true of the defeated states of the Second World War or, for that matter, of the other major states of western Europe. As Alan Milward has argued, the post-war history of western Europe is a history of the revival and reconstruction of the nation-state, not of its decline. 25The German, French, Spanish and even Italian states are, by any reasonable definition, more powerful, more efficacious and more respected in the 1990s than they were in the 1940s. Indeed, most modern states have far more power over their citizens than Napoleon, Louis XIV or, for that matter, Bismarck or Nicholas II could have dreamed of. Of course, there is much that they cannot do. In capitalist market economies, they cannot force up the long-term rate of growth by expanding demand, successfully defy the world’s currency markets or make much difference to pre-tax income differentials. But they never could.

That leads on to the second weakness inherent in the New-Right world view. It purports to explain the second phase in the post-war struggle for hegemony, but it ignores the third. If it were true, there would be no cracks in the New Right’s ascendancy, and no intimations of a new policy paradigm or a new ideological divide. The 1990s would be a continuation of the 1980s; the social and economic imperatives that gave the New Right hegemony in the 1970s could be relied upon to perpetuate its position into the next millennium. But, as we have seen, there are striking differences between the ideological climate of the late 1990s and that of ten years ago; that is, between Act Two of the drama and Act Three. And the transition from Act Two to Act Three is as important to the play as that from Act One to Act Two.

The key to these transitions, I shall argue, lies in a dimension which the political language of the last one hundred years does not capture. Since the late nineteenth century, it has been customary to distinguish between ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’ and to think in terms of transitions from one to the other. The Victorian jurist, A. V. Dicey, famously thought that the age in which he lived was dominated by a swing to collectivism, and away from the individualism of the early part of the century. More recently, W. H. Greenleaf has found the key to the British political tradition in a continuing dialectic between ‘collectivism’ and what he calls ‘libertarianism’ – essentially another word for individualism. More recently still, Robert Skidelsky has written the history of the twentieth century as a history of the rise and fall of collectivism on the one hand, and of the fall and rise of individualism on the other. Albert Hirschman’s now-classic suggestion that ‘involvement’ swings back and forth from the public to the private sphere belongs to the same genre. 26

However, despite its distinguished lineage, the distinction between individualism and collectivism is too crude to catch the full meaning of the story I have been discussing. Individualism, but for what kind of individuals? Collectivism, but for which collective goals? The abstinent, energetic, self-improving, God-fearing puritans whom Max Weber pictured as the ancestors of modern capitalism were individualists. So were (and are) the rationally-calculating utility-maximisers of Jeremy Bentham, of neo-classical economics and of the public-choice theorists of the Virginia School. But the moral and emotional meanings of these two kinds of individualism are far apart: so far, in fact, that it hinders understanding to use the same term for both. The same is true of ‘collectivism’. Joseph Stalin and R. H. Tawney both held ‘collectivist’ values, but their conceptions of the purposes and modalities of collective action were diametrically opposed.

Plainly, no simple classification can do justice to all these nuances. Yet this does not mean that there is nothing more to be said. Cutting across the familiar distinction between collectivism and individualism is a more subtle distinction between two conceptions of the Self, of the good life and of human possibilities and purposes. On one side of the divide are those who see the Self as a static bundle of preferences, and the good life as one in which individuals pursue their own preferences without interference from others. On the other are those for whom the Self is a growing and developing moral entity, and the good life one in which individuals learn to adopt higher preferences in place of lower ones. On one side of the divide, stress is laid on satisfaction; on the other, on effort, engagement and activity. The first group is uneasy with the suggestion that some satisfactions may be morally superior to others. The second believes that it is better to be Socrates unsatisfied than a pig satisfied.

It is not easy to find labels for these two conceptions. They might be termed ‘hedonist’ and ‘moralist’, or perhaps ‘passive’ and ‘active’. This yields a fourfold classification, in place of the simple dichotomy of individualism and collectivism. Individualism can be passive and hedonist, or active and moralist. So can collectivism. Individual liberty can be valued, in other words, because it allows individuals to satisfy freely-chosen desires, to live as they please so long as they do not prevent others from doing the same. Or it can be valued because it enables them to lead purposeful, self-reliant and strenuous lives, because it encourages them to take responsibility for their actions and, in doing so, to develop their moral potential to the full. By the same token, collective action and collective provision may be seen as instruments for maximising morally-neutral satisfaction, or as the underpinnings of personal and cultural growth, of engagement in the common life of the society and so of self-development and self-fulfilment. Anthony Crosland’s collectivism was essentially passive-hedonistic. So was Nigel Lawson’s individualism. Gladstone’s individualism was moralist-activist, as was R. H. Tawney’s collectivism.

From this perspective, the ebbs and flows in the struggle for moral and intellectual hegemony in post-war Britain acquire a much more complex significance. A stylised account of them might run like this. Instead of three Acts, the drama now contains five. In Act One, lasting from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, the post-war generation of Keynesian social democrats exercised moral and intellectual leadership. Their collectivism was active and moralistic. For them, rights went hand-in-hand with duties, security with activity. A just society would be a moral society – not only because its resources would be distributed fairly, but because its members would be free to lead active and fulfilling lives. Collective action and resource redistribution would rescue their beneficiaries from dependence, indignity and passivity. It would also enable them – perhaps even oblige them – to repay society for the help it had given them. An enlarged public domain held no terrors: the public domain was a place of engagement, governed by an ethic of service and commitment. Beveridge was the emblematic figure and, as Jose Harris shows in her chapter in this book, Beveridge’s vision of social citizenship was quintessentially activist, drawing on a notion of civic virtue that went back to classical Greece. Social citizenship was a status, but a status that had to be earned. Its entitlements were not charitable doles granted to passive dependants, who had done nothing to help themselves. Benefits were paid out because contributions had been paid in; and Beveridge devised his system in this way because, in his own words, ‘Management of one’s income is an essential element of a citizen’s freedom’. 27And active citizenship was a means as well as an end. Social security had to be ‘won by a democracy; it cannot be forced on a democracy or given to a democracy’. 28The same values ran through the participatory productivism of the wartime shop stewards’ movement, and inspired Stafford Cripps’s conception of democratic planning as a system of moral suasion, in which ‘the Government, both sides of industry and the people’ worked together to achieve a common end. 29They also underpinned Attlee’s robust defence of peacetime conscription as a legitimate quid pro quo for the welfare state. 30